>Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it
Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.
According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.
Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.
Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.
"Space for everything! Your life, uncompressed! Top standard tier, 200GB!"
OK, I'm a photographer. But I literally outgrew a 300GB drive about 10 years ago, and genuinely shot nearly 100GB in one week on a trip earlier in the year. Heck, my music collection's over 100GB. (No, I don't stream. Too much obscure stuff, too many low bit rate feeds.)
Those numbers. Bit basic. I remember the days when Google's storage offerings were light years ahead of the competition and effectively infinite for most uses.
> A bit sad that Google Photos will start charging you for storage soon
Google has always charged for storage in Google Photos - it's part of your "Google Drive" storage quota. They do give you 10GB free though, which can be substantial for a lot of folks.
It’s cheaper than it used to be, but it’s not so cheap that you can give away a free terabyte of it to millions of users. The announcement explicitly calls out that storage is a huge cost for them.
> I don't think Google (or NSA) datacenters have enough storage to keep up with that volume of nationwide photos.
If you keep taking pictures of the same things over and over, you get a really high compression ratio.
Not to mention that you have the option to throw out the old data.
> Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.
There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.
> > This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.
> That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Normally I would agree, but the price gap is so large (close to 10x), you could easily downgrade to the next smallest capacity level in Google Drive. You would only actually lose money if you wanted to store more than 100 GB but less than 10/0.085 = 118 GB. That means for most overcommit levels, you're still winning by a reasonable margin.
> Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
Compression is unlikely to yield enough, but perhaps deduplication would save you. Still, 10x is big gap to make up for.
> > Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
> Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.
Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with the Google Drive API, but my impression is that it is geared toward entirely different use cases (compared to S3-like storage services). Could you build a business on top of it?
> Also, we're paying about $200 / month total to store 100TB of data in the cloud, which is hard to beat with other services.
You should expect this to go away soon. I support science researchers and our unlimited storage option is going away in the coming months. Options for purchasing space are limited, and not cheap.
Peter's comment comes off as satire to me. A joke about how absurd it would be for google to store 8 exabytes of data for decades because it might one day be useful.
"So we’re also giving our Flickr users one terabyte of space — for free."
This is incredible. I remember being blown away with the 1 GB of storage I got with my gmail account back in 2005. I couldn't even fathom needing a terabyte back then. What a fun time to be alive.
> A big driver of the shift is Gmail. Google shook up the email business when Gmail launched in 2004 with much more free storage than rivals were providing at the time. It boosted the storage cap every couple of years, but in 2013 it stopped. People’s in-boxes kept filling up. And now that some of Google’s other free storage offers are shrinking, consumers are beginning to get nasty surprises.
"Ironically, I am a paying customer of Google as of a few days ago, in order to have extra storage space."
I don't believe paying for more space changes your free Gmail in any way. I too used free Gmail and paid for Drive space but it's not comparable to paying for Google Apps.
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan
Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3
According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB.
Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.
According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.
[0]https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
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